


Tally All Antecedents

by SullenSiren (lorax)



Category: Young Guns (1988)
Genre: Gen, Yuletide, Yuletide 2008
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-25
Updated: 2008-12-25
Packaged: 2017-10-08 14:08:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/76415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lorax/pseuds/SullenSiren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Doc Scurlock has always wanted to be a poet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tally All Antecedents

**Author's Note:**

  * For [P6655321 (My_Young_Friend)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/My_Young_Friend/gifts).



> Written for P6655321, AKA [drunken_hedghog](http://drunken-hedghog.livejournal.com/), in the [Yuletide Challenge](http://www.yuletidetreasure.org/). She wanted Doc, and she didn't want death fic. . . but I sort of couldn't get around that, so I hope it works well enough! I tried, but the AU angle would not work! Title taken from Whitman's "[With Antecedents](http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/waltwhitman/13224)".

**Tally All Antecedents**   
_"'T is over late at the ranchman's gate—  
He and his fellows, perhaps a score,  
Halt in a quarrel o'er night begun,  
With a ready blow and a random gun-  
There 's a dead, dead comrade! nothing more."  
\-- John Antrobus, "The Cowboy"_

Sitting in a pit, surrounded by men who'd like to kill him and one who'd die to protect him, Josiah "Doc" Scurlock has nothing to do but think, and remember.

Three days before he was hauled away from the life he'd made for himself, Yen Sun looked at him, her face moon-pale and delicate, the year since they'd met somehow only making her beauty more fragile, adding distance and sadness to her eyes. She was combing out her hair. Long, smooth strokes pulled through a gleaming black sea, the candle's glow lending each lock a warm luster they lacked in the harsh daylight. Down the hall their child slept. Had theirs ever been a story with enough truth for poetry, his existence would have been proof of their love. Her dark eyes settled on his face, and Josiah's breath caught, taken with her beauty, as he'd always been. "Did you ever love me? Or just the idea of me?" she asked him.

She was lovely. The exotic, fragile butterfly he'd once viewed her as, fluttering and elusive, and just as out of reach. "I don't know you," he'd told her. A year beside her, a child together, and she was still just an idea in his head and a body in his bed.

She smiled, turning back to her brushing. "You did not want to," she answered.

She was right.

Knowing her would have ruined the illusion, and Doc had always been a master of illusions.

She turned back to the mirror, shaking her hair back, and one slim shoulder shrugs. "It is fine, Josiah. I never wanted the truth, either. I wanted the boy on the white horse who saved me."

It was strange how two people can want the same things, and yet never really fit together, still.

During the days, he'd stand in his classroom, teach his small pupils as they fumbled their way through their alphabet, stumbling over words as they read. They learned because they were told to. Because it was part of their job. They had no reverence for the words. No understanding of how they could piece together to create something immense and beautiful and important. Even in the east there was no place for poetry in the lives of boys, and poetry had always been all Doc wanted.

During the day, he played the school teacher, the gentlemen, the husband. He tried to forget a life of dust and guns, of sweat and endless plains. A life of nights spent stretched out between friends, men who understood how fleeting life was. The dregs of society, who'd been born knowing there was a bullet somewhere, waiting for them. During the day, he tried to leave it all behind.

But at night he dreamed. The dust in his dreams glittered like something surreal and otherworldly, instead of something clinging and dirty. The terror of gunshots sounded like the thunder of a distant storm. He dreamed, too, of nights spent on the run, or in John's bunkhouse: hushed voices and quiet corners where they all pretended not to see, Dick's voice low in his ear, clean-shaven cheek against his and broad, callused hand on his skin.

He tried to leave it all behind. He wanted to, but somehow he never could.

In _Romeo and Juliet_, the love would have meant nothing without the death. In all poetry - the poetry that mattered - the beauty was always lit more sweetly bright by the misery.

Doc had termed himself a poet, spouting stolen phrases and badly paraphrased classics that made the women squirm and swoon. It'd made John's mouth quirk up at the corners, laughing without laughing and suggesting in his dry British way that perhaps a truly original work might yield even better results. Dick had rolled his eyes and then looked away, stoic and uncaring.

It had always made Billy smirk and toss his head like the wild, half-broken mustang legend sometimes compared him to. Billy, bold as brass and arrogant as a King amongst peasants, had always seen through Doc. The truth had always been that Doc was a pretender, a lover of poetry and beauty without the skill to craft it. Poetry was life, and Doc had never had the spark, the mad, teeming kind of vitality that lent poetry greatness.

Billy _was_ poetry. Poetry at its most raw, when it was as terrible as it was beautiful, when it made no sense but thrummed through the words and rocked through your mind until you couldn't rid yourself of it, and it pounded through your brain at every moment of stillness. Billy lived every moment, pushed beyond the boundaries of everything. Always in motion, a flame destined to burn bright and then snuff out. Doc hated him for that, and could never truly look away at the same time. He was drawn to the fire, no matter how it burned him.

Doc had crafted a million and one reasons why he'd stayed with Billy. Why he'd ridden with him. Why he'd fought and killed in a war that, in the end, would change nothing whether it was won or lost. He'd told himself he'd stayed for John, for Dick's memory, for his own honor, for Yen Sun.

But really, it had been for Billy. Or because of Billy, which was never the same thing. Every day he spent with his new wife, in his new life, Doc had felt just a little further away from being alive. Truly alive, with the horror and beauty and tragedy that life brought with it. His new life was safe, and good. Everything he'd told himself he wanted.

But he didn't know his wife, and he didn't dream in color unless it was of a life he'd left behind. When they burst into his classroom and ripped away the genteel façade he'd covered his life in, some part of him was relieved.

The pit they threw him in changed his mind, made him miss the security, his butterfly wife, his infant son. Still, he waited, feeling more at home in Chavez's company than he had felt with anyone since he left. They both waited - knowing Billy would come for them. Billy was loyal beyond wit, or measure, or propriety. Loyal beyond sense, and that was all part of his poetry.

And Billy comes, wild laugh and senseless grin, and the world narrows and brightens and turns intense again. Billy brings chaos with him. He always had, from that first moment when Doc had trained a rifle on his head. His life would have been infinitely simpler if he'd just fired. But Doc had never been sorry that he hadn't. Simpler wasn't always better.

They ride away in a rush of guns and dust, and Doc doubts himself at every turn, every moment. It's all the same, but it's different, too. He tells himself, tells them, at every turn that he wants to go home, but it's never quite true, and it's never quite a lie. Like everything Doc does alone, he's stuck halfway between truths. Billy has never done anything halfway. He never will. It's not in his nature. Poetry is never half beautiful, never half tragic. It either takes your breath away, or it leaves you cold.

When the glimmer of familiarity, the glamour and ferocity of Billy fades, it's the differences that strike him. Billy is still Billy, but he's older, worn around the edges. He doesn't burn quite as brightly, maybe. He's Hamlet, in the last act, but somehow he survived, running on time he shouldn't by rights have had, never meant to live beyond his own grand finish.

Even Pat hunting them is, somehow, fitting. The drama of it is ridiculous, yet appropriate, as if somehow Billy's life was meant to be wrapped in mythos. The boy bandit. The avenging hero. The wild gunman. The betrayed friend.

Doc rides on; following a trail he somehow knows isn't real. Knows it even before Billy confesses, the blood of a child still staining his clothes. But before it's said, he can pretend he doesn't know, and just ride on, secure in the lie that he wants the safety gleaming at the Blackbird's end. Doc had always dreamed of being a poet, of writing something that mattered. He hears the truth of where their trail will end, and realizes that a poet was never what he was meant to be.

Doc is no poet. He is a stanza in Billy's poem. A brief array of words, a picture formed that helped shape the whole. He was never meant to stand alone.

But Doc has made a life of stanzas. Of memorizing stray bits of poetry that he could never equal, but could admire and remember, page through inside his own mind when the world seemed too dim and lacking in poetry. Around Billy though, he'd never needed to sink into his own remembered verses. Billy wrote his own with every draw of his gun and every ringing laugh, with every body that piles up around him while he lives on. Even as Doc stands, blusters about leaving, he knows he has no where to go, and that he's ending his own part of Billy's epic.

The bullet rips through him, and with the pain comes clarity.

In the last flickering moments, his anger fades. He couldn't have ever written Billy's epic, but he knows how it will end. How they always end. How they must end to be worth anything.

He regrets that he left Yen Sun alone. He regrets that he spent so long fighting what he should have always realized he wanted.

Mostly, he regrets that he can't take a last moment to tell Billy that he understands, now. That Doc forgives him, and loves him, the way he has always loved the poetry he only half understands. Good poetry, real poetry - it's never meant to be understood. It's mean to be mad and beyond what anyone can ever take in. Billy's always been that kind of poem.

He just stands. Smiles as he calls Billy's name. Smiles despite everything, and he sees in Billy's face that he doesn't understand. Doc doesn't explain. Billy will understand soon enough. He says, "Let's finish the game."

Billy smiles back just a little. Still wild, still free, but heavier now, weighted down by his own inevitability. Words ring through Doc's head, a million stanzas learned and lost over the years coming back to him.

Doc was no poet.

But he was a hell of a verse.

~~~


End file.
